Get out, Nina thought, get out of here. Anyone—German patrols, Poles looking for enemies, fugitives sniffing out travelers to rob—could have heard the U-2 land; anyone could decide to investigate, and until proved wrong, Nina was going to assume everyone she met was an enemy. Get out of here before anyone finds you. But she couldn’t move. Nina thought she’d already left everything behind that there was to leave—her regiment, her sisters, her lover—but there was one more thing, after all: her gallant Rusalka with its painted fuselage and assertive little engine, whose wings had carried her through so many missions, whose shadow had embraced her and Yelena in the grass on long summer days. The Rusalka, so alive to Nina’s touch that she practically sang. Nina had thought there was no more pain left to feel tonight, but she embraced her plane, as much of its body as her arms could hold, and she wailed her agony into its frame.
Then she swiped at her burning eyes and began tearing at the U-2 with her bare hands, stripping cockpit and fuselage as if she were stripping flesh from bones, cannibalizing it of anything that might be useful. She stuffed her knapsack full to bulging, then went to the underbrush and filled her arms with dead leaves and twigs. The woods were damp and muddy from a recent rain, but even if they weren’t, she didn’t care about the risk of setting the trees alight. Grief was draining away to be replaced by white-hot Markov rage, her father’s all-destroying fury that cared nothing for sense or self-preservation. Nina didn’t care if she burned half of Poland and crisped her own bones to ash; she wasn’t leaving the Rusalka to rot. Filling the cockpit with brush, she struck a match from her supplies and flung it into the tinder. The fire caught, kindled, leaped up. Nina stood back, watching the smoke boil. Only when the Rusalka was engulfed in flame, stiffened fabric curling away to reveal the skeletal wooden bones, did Nina turn away. She shouldered her knapsack and followed her own long leaping shadow west into the trees, as the Rusalka writhed and died on her funeral pyre.
A COMPASS. A loaded pistol. Matches. A sack of emergency supplies—sugared milk, a chocolate bar, the extra food she’d snatched from the barracks. The scarf embroidered with blue stars. A roll of stiffened cloth, struts, and wiring stripped from the Rusalka. The razor.
That was all.
Nina exhaled a shaky breath. “Not all,” she said aloud. She had good boots and heavy overalls, her sealskin cap. She had warm summer weather. And she had everything learned growing up on the shores of the Old Man.
Nina walked until she heard the trickle of a stream, drank from her cupped hands, ate half a chocolate bar, then rigged a shelter from the Rusalka’s scavenged cloth and struts. She collapsed under it with the razor in one fist, sleep falling like an avalanche, only to wake in the night bathed in clammy sweat, agonizing cramps racking her legs, teeth chattering as though it were midwinter. Nina had never been ill a day in her life but she was ill now, nose and eyes watering, hands shaking too badly to light a campfire. She huddled under her shelter, trying to rub the cramps out of her thighs, smelling her own rank sweat, and when she looked up she saw her father gazing down at her with yellowed eyes.
“You’re not here,” she said through clattering teeth. “I’m dreaming.”
He squatted down. “How long has it been since you had a Coca-Cola pill, little huntress?”
Two days—or more? Somehow another day had come and gone. Nina could have sworn it had only been an hour since the shakes woke her in the night, yet between one set of shivers and the next, she’d somehow lost a day. That made it at least three days since she’d swallowed one of those tablets that flooded her veins with quicksilver—and for months and months, she hadn’t gone a day without them.
Her father snorted, scornful.
“Go away.” Why did she have to hallucinate him of all people? “I don’t want you. I want Yelena.” She wanted Yelena so badly, her sparkling eyes and fierce kisses.
“You’re stuck with me, rusalka,” her father said. “That lily-livered bitch didn’t want you.”
“Go away,” Nina cried, then cried out again from the pain of her muscle cramps. She closed her eyes for an instant, and when she opened them again it was bright midday. She’d never been so hungry in her life; she drank all the sugared milk and shivered to see how her food stores were all but gone. She managed to stagger downwind of her little shelter to lay a few game traps, hands shaking too much to fashion more than the simplest of snares out of plane wiring.
Time kept bending and melding. Her waking hours were full of cramping muscles and watery bowels, heading to the stream to drink and then back to her shelter to curl around her jittering limbs. Her sleeping hours were full of nightmares. Over and over she lost control of the Rusalka over the surface of the lake, sinking through aquamarine water with lungs bursting. She imagined footsteps outside the shelter and erupted screaming, squeezing the trigger of her pistol over and over as she aimed it into the darkness. Too late she realized no one was there, and she’d just wasted all her ammunition. She could have wept, but tears were no good; she crawled back into the shelter only to dream of Yelena dying, going down in a blossom of flame. If she dies, you will never know it. Yelena was gone; Nina was never going to know if she lived or died or fell in love with another. She succumbed to tears then, sobbing in the haunted night.
She had no idea how long she was ill—the days and nights seemed to flash past in cycles. At some point her father disappeared, and Nina’s lethargy abated enough to strip off and wash her filthy overalls. Sitting naked on the stream bank waiting for her clothes to dry, she flexed her fingers in the sunlight. Grown thin, but they weren’t shaking anymore. That damned Coca-Cola, she thought. Her dreams were still terrible, she was still racked with sudden illogical convictions that someone was sneaking up behind her, but the muscle cramps had mostly disappeared, and she was strong enough to set a fire and cook the rabbit she found in her snare.
“Time to move,” she said aloud, because Nina Markova might want to die, but she was too stubborn to starve in a Polish forest. She climbed into her damp overalls, took down her shelter, began trekking west again.
And in the second week, she met Sebastian.
Chapter 39
Jordan
July 1950
Boston
Dancers mirrored endlessly across a battered barre—click. Pointe shoes rubbing through the resin box—click. Quietly Jordan moved around the fringes of the Copley Dance Academy’s advanced class. A taut-pulled bun coming loose midplié, a forehead leaned wearily against an arched foot. Click. Click.
“Did you get what you wanted?” Tony asked as they left the studio.
“I think so. I won’t know for certain until I look at the negatives.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over her shoulder. “You were very helpful.”
It surprised her just how helpful. Shooting pictures with Garrett had often left her annoyed; he kept sneaking kisses or else talking when she trying to concentrate. Tony had been different. He’d flirted outrageously, not with the dancers but with Madame Tamara, the eighty-year-old instructor who called him a naughty boy in Russian and ended up letting Jordan stay the entire class rather than shooing her out after ten minutes. Tony had gravely aped the dancers’ pliés as they began, and they laughed so much they forgot Jordan was there; she’d been able to start clicking away without waiting for her subjects to relax. Tony had then faded quietly back against the wall, handing her film before she needed to ask for it. “You were an excellent assistant,” Jordan said as they swung around the corner into Copley Square.
He smiled, lazing along hatless in the summer sunshine. Heat shimmered above the pavement, and through the square women blotted their palms inside sweaty gloves and men tugged at collars whose starch had gone limp. “Can we discuss my fee for the morning’s work?”
“Oh, there’s a fee, now?” Jordan adjusted her broad-brimmed summer straw. “What are you going to cost me?”
“A swan boat ride.”
“No Bostonian would ever be caught dead on a swan boat unless you’re being dragged by your little sister. It’s for tourists.”
“I’m a tourist, and my fee for hauling your bag and buttering up that old dame who claimed she was a White Russian countess who fled the Bolsheviks is a swan boat ride.”
Jordan took his arm, turning toward the Public Garden a few blocks away. “White Russian countess?”
“Her accent was Ukrainian, but I was too much of a gentleman to call her a fibber.”
“So you spoke Russian just now to Madame Tamara, and French to those Parisian tourists who came into the shop three weeks ago.” Jordan tilted her head. “And I’m sure I’ve heard you speak German to Mr. Kolb . . .”
“He didn’t like that much. Odd duck, that one. How did your father come across him?”
“He was coming overseas and needed a sponsor. He’s twitchy,” Jordan admitted, “but he had a bad war, or so Anna said.”
“Is she a wicked stepmother, your Mrs. Anna? Poison apples, makes you sleep in the cinders?”
Jordan smiled. “No, she’s wonderful.”
“Too bad, I always liked stories about wicked stepmothers. My Hungarian grandmother told me ghoulish tales growing up, the kind where the wicked stepmother wins in the end, not Cinderella. The farther east from the Rhine, the darker the fairy tales.”
“Hungarian now—really, how many languages do you speak?”
“Six or seven. Eight?” Tony shrugged. “My mother’s parents were a Hungarian and a Pole, and my father’s parents were a Romanian and a Kraut, and everybody came to Queens for a grab at the American dream. That’s a lot of languages going back and forth over a dinner table when you’re growing up.”